Israeli raid on Jenin: Continued aggression on Palestinian refugee camp

Modified from a guest opinion appearing July 16, 2023 in the Asheville Citizen Times, North Carolina. It shows that average Americans with little knowledge of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but brainwashed by the Zionist-submissive American media, are finally understanding what the conflict is about.

Haunted by images of July 3 Israeli attack on Palestinian Jenin refugee camp

Where were you on July 3 when Israel raided the Jenin refugee camp? I know where I was ― on the West Bank in Bethlehem, 60 miles south of Jenin, which is at the northern tip of the West Bank. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the area, the West Bank is a Palestinian Arab section walled off by the Israeli government. When I say walled off, I mean there is a wall several stories high built by Israel with the intent of keeping the Palestinians on the other side. It is a harsh looking, intimidating wall with barbed wire and entry points staffed by armed Israeli military personnel.

On the Palestinian side of the wall, there is painted artistic graffiti asking for peace and reconciliation. Israel has nuclear capacity and an extremely well equipped army. This is an army that defeated a half dozen neighboring Arab countries in six days in 1967. At that time Israel took the Golan Heights from Syria, the West Bank from Jordan, and the Gaza Strip and the Sinai from Egypt. The Palestinians do not have a standing army, navy or air force. The Palestinians have no heavy weaponry. It is unclear why Israel finds it necessary to invade a refugee camp. It is true that the Jenin refugee camp is known for its militancy but militancy in the face of occupation is not uncommon. The Hebrew people had a similar reaction to the Roman occupation some 2,000 years ago.

We were in a restaurant in Bethlehem when the news of the invasion broke. A Palestinian news network provided the coverage on TV. They did not shy away from showing the carnage. I will be haunted for a long time by a picture of a woman lying face down between two parked cars. I assume she was dead. So why must we ponder a conflict between people that results in death?

This can be traced back to the Zionist movement that began in Europe as a colonial enterprise based on Jewish nationalism that was trying to imitate the other European colonial nationalisms and their empires during the 19th century. The Zionists first considered Uganda and Argentina as places where the Jewish people could establish a colonial empire. Then by the time of World War I when the Ottoman Empire collapsed, Britain had borrowed lots of money from Jewish bankers to fund its war effort. So when Britain was given a mandate by the League of Nations to help the Palestinians build a state over their land (just like the French were given a mandate over neighboring Lebanon), Britain violated the mandate and betrayed the indigenous Palestinians. It awarded the European Zionists a license (Balfour Declaration) to build a colonial empire in Palestine, on the same land where the Palestinians were supposed to build their state with help from Britain. Granted that the ancestors of the Jews, the Hebrews, once existed in Palestine, but that was 2,000 years earlier. The Zionists had no fundamental rights to Palestine which was therefore sold by Britain to wealthy European Jews who wanted an empire.

Hitler’s persecution of the Jews during World War II transformed the Zionist colonial enterprise into a desire for a Jewish homeland to accommodate the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust whom neither Britain nor the United States wanted. So the European Jews took it upon themselves to displace the Palestinian people and steal their land. Let’s be clear, Judaism defines a religion. It does not define a nation. There are Arab Jews, Persian Jews, Indian Jews, African Jews, American Jews, and European Jews. All these people share a religion, but they have very different cultures. There is no such thing as a Jewish people, just as there is no such thing as a Christian people, a Hindu people, or a Muslim people.

We need to abandon the idea that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a Muslim-Jewish conflict, for it is not. It is not a Jewish-Arab conflict as many indigenous people who embrace Judaism as a religion and/or culture, will also embrace their Arabic ancestry. These perceptions cloud what is really taking place ― an indigenous population is resistant to being controlled by people who are not indigenous to the area. The situation is not too different from what the Native Americans faced when Europeans decided to settle the Western Hemisphere. With the exception of a few indigenous Palestinians who accepted occupation by the invading foreign Jewish population in 1948, the indigenous people of Palestine do not have citizenship. They have no voter rights. While the Jewish settlements on the West Bank, populated by Jews from foreign countries, primarily the United States, have a voice in the affairs of the Israeli government, the surrounding indigenous Palestinian population does not. The indigenous Palestinians are an occupied population. When an indigenous population is occupied by a non-indigenous population, resistance and radicalization become a natural occurrence. That same condition existed in the pre-Constitution days of the United States, which resulted in our founding fathers declaring independence from British rule. That intent was made clear in the Declaration of Independence.

The present day conflict between the Israeli government and the Palestinian people is not a religious conflict nor is it a conflict in culture. It is a conflict that arises from the occupation of an indigenous population by an non-indigenous population. The Hebrew people resisted Rome and the Palestinians are resisting a government of non-indigenous people. It is that simple.